1803 If there were an award for the most successful fan letter in English literature, it should go to Thomas de Quincey, later famous as the author of the classic Romantic memoir, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822).
Born in 1785, De Quincey’s upbringing was chaotic and wholly unpromising. Precocious but neurotic, he ran away from school and, at the age of eighteen, near starvation in London, he penned a letter to Wordsworth – a writer whom, on the strength of the Lyrical Ballads, he regarded as a god. On 13 May 1803, he drafted the letter to Wordsworth in his diary. It began:
What I am going to say, I know, would seem strange to most men: and to most men therefore I would not say it; but to you I will, because your feelings do not follow the current of the world. From the time when I first saw the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ I made a resolution to obtain (if I could) the friendship of their author.
It was an extraordinarily brash letter from a young nobody to a great somebody. De Quincey probably thought so himself, and did not dispatch the letter for some weeks. ‘Gradually’, as De Quincey’s biographer, Robert Morrison, records:
he rewrote it, and finally, on the afternoon of 31 May, he completed an augmented and, in parts, thoroughly revised version. Copied and sealed by twenty minutes before 4 o’clock, Thomas took it straight to the post office and mailed it to Wordsworth care of his publisher Longman in Paternoster Row, London.
‘What claim’, he wrote, ‘can I urge to a fellowship such as yours … beaming (as it does) with genius so wild and so magnificent? I dare not say that I too have some spark of that heavenly fire which blazes there.’
There was no reply for two months. The familiar fate of all such letters. But it had been held up in the publisher’s office. Wordsworth did not receive it until 27 July and wrote back almost the same day, saying: ‘I am already kindly disposed to you.’
It was the foundation of the most important relationship in De Quincey’s life. A few years later he, too, would settle in Dove Cottage, Grasmere (the other poet’s home), living and writing there for a decade. It was here, in the heart of the literary Lake District, that he addicted himself to the drug that he describes so lyrically (and at times so gothically) in his most famous work.